Are games being too lenient these days? Was it bad for Elden Ring to let you reallocate your levels? Should every choice be permanent? These are questions…

Transcript:

Upgrades, classes, skill trees, they’re in so many games these days. Do I become a ranger or a mage? Do get a perk that lets me do better damage with handguns or with rifles? Do I put my points into Agility or Endurance?

These are the questions we’re presented with so often in modern games.

And something designers often struggle with, is how hard the player should be locked into these choices. Should they be allowed to undo that choice and make another?

I’m gonna break down every level of that spectrum and find out which is, DEFINITIVELY, the right way to restrain the player. Welcome, to System Review. And this… is the respec.

I think there’s three ways developers decide on how permanent to make your choices.

First is hard-locked choices, then soft-locked, and finally choices you’re not locked into at all. These are a little more complicated than you might think, but we’ll get into that later.

For now, let’s explore hard-locked choices.

This is the most restrictive. You’re unable to change the way skill points are allocated in Fallout games. You can’t unlearn technology researched in a Total War game. These are choices that you make, and they become a permanent part of your playthrough. In almost every Fallout 3 playthrough I’ve ever done, I spend my skill points from my first level up into Explosives. I do this so I can disarm the bomb in Megaton immediately. But I very rarely use weapons that fit in the Explosives group, so those points will never be utilized past that skill check.

That’s a trade-off. I spend however many points on a skill I don’t care about as soon as possible so I can beat this quest the moment I reach Megaton. Maybe those points for the first level would have been better allocated towards lockpicking or repair, but I think the choice you’re forced to make here is interesting. Do I continue chugging along with my build towards the skills I’m interested in? Or do I take a detour in that progression to level up something for a skill check?

Forcing the player to make a choice like that is an easy way to give them agency. It lets them feel like their playthrough is unique compared to anyone else’s. If we’re applying real world logic, it makes sense that I shouldn’t be able to go back and reallocate those points I put into the medicine skill. If you spend years of your life studying medicine, it’s not like you can go back in time and make it so you had spent those years studying fist fighting instead.

While you can’t just become a new person to have another go at life, you CAN make a new Fallout 3 character and start from scratch.

Another choice I often see hard-locked is class selection. The knight, mage, archer, that kinda thing.

This choice is often presented at character creation, before you even get into the world. You launch the game, hit “New Character”, and you’re asked to pick a class alongside your appearance and name.

That always sat wrong with me. It feels bizarre asking the player what playstyle they want before knowing anything about the game.

Now sure, you might argue that people gravitate towards archetypes they’re interested in and just kinda adapt to how they play in that particular game. But a lot of the times, these archetypes are so broad, that there’s a lot of creative wiggle room for developers to make a playstyle a player doesn’t like. Lemme give an example.

I like summoners in games. I think it’s cool to have a bunch of minions following me and swarming bad guys. BUT. I particularly like the type of summoner with permanent minions. I don’t like summoners that can summon skeletons for 15 seconds then they disappear. I dislike that variant to the point where I’d just rather play another class.

And the problem for me, comes in when I don’t know which variant they have in the game. I’ll see that some game has a Necromancer but I don’t know which type.

Most of the time, at these character creation screens, all you’re given is a short description of the class and what their outfits look like. But that little description can’t cover anything.

And more importantly, it can’t convey what it’s like to play a class. You could watch all the videos you want showing off a class, but in the end, it comes down to how it FEELS to play. That’s something you can only tell first hand.

The only MMO that I’ve played that even attempts to solve that problem while having classes-locked is Lost Ark. You go through the character creation and select a class like most games. Then, when you get in-game, you’re immediately thrown into a tutorial where you get to test out the different sub-classes for that class. It gives you a little sandbox to spawn enemies and a handful of spells to see which variant you like.

I kinda wish this sandbox was something you could access straight from the character creation screen, but you get to it literally within the first 10 seconds of the game. If you don’t like how any of the assassin variants play, delete that character and make a new one.

It still has that traditional restriction, but the penalty for starting over this early means literally nothing.

I should say, choices that are hard-locked aren’t inherently bad. I feel like the industry is shifting away from them over the years, but they still have their place. Perks are hard-locked in Fallout 4, which might have annoyed me, if not for the fact that there’s no level cap. Fallout 3 was capped at 30 and New Vegas at 50. If I want to unlock all the perks in Fallout 4, I’d have to hit level 272. So if I play long enough, I’ll eventually have this whole screen unlocked. If you regret a perk you levelled up, that’s okay, there’s plenty more perk points to go around.

In regards to important hard-locked choices like class selection… I think it’s fine. Ranger, warlock, knight, these are fundamentally different ways to play one game. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world to have those choices be locked in at some point. The player should be properly informed about what they’re picking though. Maybe show them some of the primary skills of the class during character creation, preferably let them try it out themselves. It can suck if you choose wrong, but you can always make another character.

Next up are soft-locked choices.

These are choices that you’re initially locked into, but you can eventually undo at some point for a cost. Whether that be through an in-game currency or time spent grinding, there’s a barrier put between you and getting a do-over at a choice you previously made.

In Grim Dawn, it’ll cost you a handful of currency per point you want to undo from your skill trees. That’s pretty low stakes, considering how much you get just for playing the game.

Elden Ring’s respec is the opposite. You can reallocate all the souls you’ve put into levelling up, but you need a particular item… a larval tear. And there’s only so many of those in the world. 18, to be exact.

You can only respec your stats 18 items in Elden Ring.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, 18 times is a lot. As someone who plays the Souls games casually, that’s more than enough for me.

On the other hand, what about people who do PvP? What about the people who want to try out a variety of different builds on one character? They’re limited in the amount of times they can go back and try another build. And if they’re at the point where they used their 18th larval tear, they’ve already put an insane amount of time into that character and might not want to start from scratch on a new one.

Souls games before Elden Ring were even more strict in how many respecs they offered you. You could only do it 5 times per New Game+ cycle in Dark Souls 3, and there wasn’t even an option to in the first Dark Souls.

I think giving the player the ability to have a do-over at a choice for a cost is a happy medium between the two extremes. It’s not as rigid as hard-locked choices and the player still has to put their foot down and make a choice compared to freely-switchable ones.

Let’s talk about that.

Freely-switchable choices is the last category and it’s kinda complicated. For a game that most directly relates to what we’ve already talked about, let’s look at Diablo 3. Diablo 3 has class-locking like we talked about earlier, but that’s not what I wanna bring up. I wanna focus on the class’s skills. There’s not really a skill tree to speak of in the game, you just unlock certain skills when you hit certain levels. Compared to Grim Dawn’s skill tree, this is a lot simpler.

And a lot more freeing in a way. From a purely mechanical perspective, I feel like I’m incentivized to experiment more. Even though you CAN respec in Grim Dawn, it does cost SOMETHING. There is literally no penalty swapping between spells in Diablo 3.

And ugh… Final Fantasy 14. This game is a dream come true for people that get anxiety about class selection and limited respecs.

Like most MMOs, you pick a class when making a character. Once you’ve made that character though, you’re free to change to any other class you want. Just equip the right soul crystal and the change is instantaneous. You can swap from Dragoon, to Bard, to Red Mage, to every one of the 19 jobs whenever you want.

I love that. It’s so… freeing. I picked Summoner when I first made my character, and I liked it well enough. But I got bored of that playstyle after a while, so I started shopping around for a new main job. I eventually stumbled onto Red Mage and have had a blast with that ever since. And the best part, I didn’t have to make a new character for that. I didn’t have to play through ALL the story stuff I had up to that point, I could just continue from where I was.

Of course, whenever you pick up a new job, you start at level 1, so you will have to get back up to whatever level your quests are, but that’s a small price to pay in my eyes. And for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want every job to be automatically leveled to my highest level one. Part of the levelling process is learning how to play that particular job. Slowly getting the rotation down and understanding every one of your skills. I was a level 60 summoner when I switched to Red Mage. If I had all the Red Mage spells up to level 60 thrown at me the instant I changed, I would have had NO idea what I was doing.

That singular mechanic is why Final Fantasy 14 is my favorite MMO. I hate the idea of having a half-dozen alts all specializing in different things, when in FF14, I have one character that’s proficient in all those classes.

So those are games that feature freely-switchable choices in regards to the examples I gave before, but it can get much more broad than that.

There are no traditional jobs in Final Fantasy 7. You equip spells to whichever character you want to fill any particular role. You can unequip them and equip them as often as you want.

Or what about Monster Hunter? Weapons are the classes of that game and you can swap those whenever you want as well.

It’s notable that there’s some games that are very interested in having these defined archetypes that you get locked into, like with most MMOs. The roots of this design philosophy can be traced back all the way to Dungeons and Dragons in the mid 70s.

And then you have some games that aren’t interested in strictly defined roles at all. Skyrim has you leaning into certain playstyles that look similar to the traditional archetypes, but it has no interest in putting a label on you.

There’s a subset of games these days that really like to focus on that. They don’t wanna label you as any class or have any choice be permanent. I really like that philosophy. I like not having the pressure to make a choice I know I can’t ever go back on.

But… that pressure is the point. It’s a feature.

The first Dark Souls is oppressive. The environment. The enemies, the difficulty. It was all developed to make you feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle. And the fact that you couldn’t reallocate your levels is part of that. Being able to change your mind like in Elden Ring is a quality of life feature. It’s them deciding they want to give a little bit of leeway to the players in case they horribly screwed up or just want to try a new build.

If Dark Souls let me reallocate all my levels whenever I wanted for no cost, it would change the effect the game has on me. That’s such a huge olive branch given to the player, potentially to the detriment of the game. This hypothetical Dark Souls is oppressive in every way… except for how there’s no permanence to any level up choices you make.

As much as I like games where I can go back on any choice at any time, I have to acknowledge that permanent choices are important. Being able to make a choice is what defines video games from other media. And when those choices are locked in for good, they stick with you.

When making a new character in an MMO, like Final Fantasy 14, you design them in the image you want. Granted, appearance doesn’t matter much in terms of gameplay, but if you’re invested in the game beyond the mechanical aspects, it’ll matter to you in the long term. You see them in cutscenes all the time and they emote, your created character is an actual character in this world. I didn’t spend much time in the character creation screen when making this guy a couple years ago, but over the dozens and dozens of hours I’ve spent playing the game, he’s grown on me.

I like that. If I could freely change race and appearance at no cost, maybe I’d lose that connection. I was playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint recently, and you can change your character’s facial structure from the pause menu. It’s a nice quality-of-life thing, I guess, but it dissociates me from my character. He’s not John Breakpoint, an actual person with defined features, he’s a shape-shifting player avatar. I take the game’s story less seriously.

So. I think it’s time I finally give you the DEFINITIVE, FINAL, NEVER-TO-BE-QUESTIONED-AGAIN conclusion. Which of these philosophies is BEST?

…

It depends. Before I started writing this, I thought I’d lean towards making no choices locked, but after talking through all this, I appreciate the value in being forced to pick something and stick with it.

If I were to actually pick one, I think I’d lean towards my favorite being soft-locked choices. I genuinely think a lot of MMOs would benefit from Final Fantasy 14’s class switching mechanic.

If you wanna hear me expand some more on Final Fantasy 7’s choices, check out this video. I think that serves as good supplementary material to what you just watched.

Thanks for watching, see ya next time.